Mark Senftner lost his son, Tate, to suicide on New Year's Day in Onida in central South Dakota. / Melissa Sue Gerrits / Argus Leader

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ONIDA — She had just got out of bed that morning, this past New Year’s Day, when Lynn Senftner grabbed her cellphone and wandered out of the bedroom.

She had missed a text from her son, Tate, at 2:45 in the morning. “I’m sorry Mom,” it read. “I’ll always be your firstborn.”

“Great,” she thought as she shook her head. Tate and his buddies must have been busted at a party the night before. Her All-American son — star athlete at Sully Buttes High, class president all four years of school, coach’s kid — probably got himself an underage possession citation with his New Year’s revelry.

What in the world was he thinking?

It is a question now that will haunt Mark and Lynn Senftner the rest of their lives. In fact, their son hadn’t been arrested. He hadn’t run into local law enforcement at all. His cryptic text message was about something much darker, though they wouldn’t know it until later that morning, when they found his body slumped at their front door.

Difficult relationship

Tate left no note., and the family hasn’t gone to local law enforcement yet to retrieve his cellphone, which might reveal where his mind was before his death. His parents know their son was troubled by a breakup with a girlfriend from another community who he had been seeing for three years. It was his idea to end the relationship, his mother believes, though he changed his mind afterward and was crushed to learn she had moved on.

“Basically, he decided that it was the wrong idea” to break up, Lynn Senftner said. “So if you ask us today why this happened, we believe he was heartbroken and really missed his best friend.”

Could there have been other reasons? No one really seems to know. There was nothing about his behavior during the last days or weeks to suggest he had planned this all along. On the other hand, it’s unfathomable for the Senftners to think their son might have acted spontaneously on a decision that was so horribly irreversible.

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“I sit here and think, ‘He wasted so much,’ ” Lynn Senftner said. “Besides us being heartbroken, and besides it being a waste of his talents, I mean, he was so good and so smart and so kind. He would have overcome this, and … “

The words trail off for a moment. “I say he’s so kind,” she continued. “And yet we’re so hurt.”

The experts will tell you that a person determined to kill himself is so consumed by emotional pain that he can’t fathom the agony he will exact on others. Struggling with that long-term trauma is left for the living, and the Senftners got a sense of how many others knew at least some of their pain when they buried their son the first Saturday in January.

More than 1,000 people jammed into the high school gym at Onida, a town of 658 residents. Friends, relatives, teammates, classmates, sports officials and even opposing coaches journeyed from every corner of South Dakota. It was a blessing and a bitter reminder to the family that there were more than 1,000 people who would have gladly reached out to their son if only he would have let them.

“What he did was such … a permanent solution to a short-term problem,” Lynn Senftner said. “It’s so hurtful that he didn’t think anyone cared enough.”

Without question, plenty of people cared. Tate Senftner couldn’t begin to imagine the connections he made in his life, starting 20 years ago in Gregory where his parents were teachers and he was born. It was true of Timber Lake as well, where the family moved when Tate was in the first grade and, five years later, at their next stop in Onida.

Mark Senftner, 50, a McLaughlin native, is the high school football and girls basketball coach for Sully Buttes. His wife, from Winner originally, teaches the first grade. Their younger son, Scott, a high school freshman, long idolized the big brother who seemed a star at everything he did.

Tate dabbled in music, drama, journalism and student government. He was nominated for Boys State. He participated in Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, what formerly was called Future Homemakers of America. He looked forward to the student council conferences in Pierre. But his truest passion was sports.

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He came off the bench for Sully Buttes’ 2009 state Class B championship basketball team. He was all-state in football in 2009 and 2010, and all-state in basketball in 2011. The list goes on and on.

“He was a sports guy,” said Tom Dosch, the head football coach at Northern State University who invited Tate to continue his playing days after high school on the Aberdeen campus. “He was a great student, involved in a lot of extracurricular stuff in addition to sports, which is not uncommon, especially in small towns.”

For all of his athletic prowess, 6-foot-2, 200-pound Tate didn’t have college recruiters drooling over him. “But we went to Northern, we met with their staff and Coach Dosch, and Tate seemed happy with that decision,” Mark Senftner, 50, said.

Initially, the young man thought he might pursue an accounting degree at Northern. In his senior year at Sully Buttes, he had done a project on banking and had landed a job as a teller afterward working at the local Bank West branch. That could be a good career for him, his parents thought, though in all actuality, they knew better.

“We both knew he was going to be a coach because of his dad,” Lynn Senftner said. “We had hoped he would consider other things because all he had known growing up was what it was his dad did.”

Sure enough, last fall Tate sent his mother a text message. It read, “Mom, I’m changing my major. I’ll call you later.” He switched to a program in history education and coaching.

The son loved to scout other teams with his father as he was growing up. He voraciously soaked up every piece of sports minutiae and trivia he could find in the newspaper or online.In high school, Tate had always been a wide receiver in football. But Dosch had other ideas for him at Northern. He wanted him to play outside linebacker. “Tate was nervous about that,” his mother said. “We had a couple of tough phone calls.”

If the young man was struggling with the transition – if he was struggling with anything, Dosch and the other coaches at Northern weren’t seeing it.

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Though only a walk-on with the team, Tate got to travel to road games, and was getting to play. Off the football field, he was performing well in classes, scoring a 3.8 grade-point average his last semester in Aberdeen. “Academically, he performed as well as he ever did that last semester,” his father said.

That’s not to say that their son was breezing blithely through life at that point, the Senftners said. He would beat himself up when he thought he wasn’t doing well, especially at college, Mark Senftner said. And their son could struggle with what Lynn Senftner called “a huge sense of right and wrong.”

“He had a stubborn streak, but also was very forgiving,” she said. “He tried very hard to be fair, and even though he knew things were not always fair and just, it bothered him to see people being taken advantage of or being dismissed. He was sensitive and sometimes too kind.”

No troubling signs

If those were telltale signs of a troubled soul, the Senftners didn’t see them. The only clear vision they had into his trials were the conversations he had about the girl he couldn’t get back. While it meant a lot to Lynn Senftner that her son seemed so willing to open up his heart to her in the text messaging conversations they had, it was difficult to sense his heart breaking.

“She’s my best friend, and I miss her,” Tate would text to his mother, who in turn would gently remind him that he simply needed to give it time.

“Relationships are hard,” she said. “I think he felt like nobody was going to be interested in dating him again.”

Still, life goes on, and Tate Senftner seemed to be moving on with his. He and his brother and mother were going to Rapid City right after New Year’s for dermatology appointments, and so Tate could get into urgent care to see a doctor about a virus he was fighting.

Her college son had been lying around the house a lot in the days after Northern went on its Christmas break. Maybe it was the virus, she thought. More likely, it was just typical kids — prowl at night and sleep during the day.

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Still, with the news blaring on the television set about 20 schoolchildren slaughtered in Newtown, Conn., she couldn’t get too upset with Tate. “He wasn’t perfect,” she would say. “But he was perfectly ours.”

On New Year’s Eve, he sat on the couch in the living room until about 8 p.m. His parents had decided to stay in for the evening. As Tate got up to leave, he simply said, “I’ll see you.”

The next morning, having finally looked at his text message, Lynn Senftner was so thankful that he had decided to stay put and not drive if he had been partying. “Where are you?” she texted him. No answer.

When she checked his room later and saw his phone charger was plugged in, she texted him again. “C’mon,” she said. “Where are you?”

Lynn Senftner went upstairs to check her son’s computer, to see whether he had sent any emails. She went back downstairs and was watching the Sioux Falls Lincoln High School band perform on television during the Rose Bowl parade.

About 10:15, 10:30 that morning, she went in to take a shower as her husband headed out the front door. All of a sudden, she heard him shouting, “Come here. Come here.”

“I had thrown some clothes on; I was still wet,” she recalled. “Tate was right in front of the door, two steps from being in the house and being safe. I thought he slipped and hit his head. I didn’t even see the gun.”

Four days later, as a community mourned, Northern State’s football coach stood before a packed gym and told 1,000 people that they should not blame themselves for the act that had brought them together on that day.

As for the next young man or woman who might be considering suicide, Lynn Senftner wishes they would remember her son and the deep, enduring heartache he has left behind.

“I sit at late at night and think about it,” she said. “Night is hard; I think everything is sadder in the dark. And you play every single minute back of that New Year’s Eve. There’s always guilt, always regret. And I know that’s not what he meant to do, but that’s what he’s left me for the rest of my life.”